Shared Source vs. Open Source: Panel Discussion

Tim:
Sounds like some of Michael's speech was maybe a
treaty with the free software people. [laughter]

Anyway, there probably are divisions within
Microsoft just as there are divisions within our community. It's kind
of interesting, because the diversity of opinions often leads not to
division but to strength, and I think we're going to demonstrate that
strength as we hear from a number of people who are prominent in our
community and are allied under the banner of the core principles of
open source, but who do have different takes on how it works and
what's important about it.

Anyway, I'd like to invite up the rest of our
panel. Michael and Craig, you may want to come back up and sit
down.

I have here with us Brian Behlendorf, who's one of
the cofounders of the Apache Project. [applause] I'll just start down
at the far end, then.

Clay Shirky is a partner at an incubator called
the Accelerator Group. He's also a well-known commentator on coming
technologies, and he's recently done some very interesting thinking about some of Microsoft's new technologies, in particular Hailstorm.
That's why he's here to talk to us. [applause]

Dave Stutz is, I believe, now the program manager
for the shared source implementation of the common language run time
and so forth. Is that the appropriate designation?

Tim:Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know, maybe
something like, if you had the hat [reference to the red hats on
heads all through the room], I would say, "Mini-Me. Do not chew
on your hat." [laughter]

Next in line is Mitchell Baker, who's known as the
Chief Lizard Wrangler at Mozilla.org. Mitchell is also the person who
wrote the Mozilla license,
so she's done a lot of thinking about free software and open source
licenses and the needs of corporations. [applause]

We have with us Ron Johnson, who's an attorney at
Arnold & Porter and the chair of the 22nd Annual Computer and
Internet Law Institute.

And obviously you know Craig, and I already
introduced Brian.

So, Craig, I don't know if you wanted to respond
at all to any of Michael's comments [laughter], or whether you want
to hear from a few other people before we get there.

Craig:
I'll just offer one general thought, which is, you
know, in some sense it's easy to poke fun or think you know what is
the look-in from the outside and to be at Microsoft.

We're a company now of 50,000 people, and among
any community of 50,000 people, particularly fairly smart people,
you're going to have a lot of people who think carefully about a lot
of issues, and feel passionately as you do about a lot of issues. So
I don't think we're embarrassed at all to find that people would come
forward at Microsoft and ask questions or ask whether we do the right
thing or not.

What I can tell you is that there is a
single-purpose focus in the management of the company. The leadership
of the company is not uncertain about what we're doing. We welcome
people asking questions in the company, but ultimately we recognize
our job is to make decisions and provide consistent leadership. And
so if people don't like what the company wants to do, there's no
indentured servitude. You know, they're free to go do something else.
But the company is clear about what it will do. And I can just tell
you that as a member of a management committee of the company, and
while listening to Michael's comments that many of the ways he
characterizes what he thinks may go on inside the company in terms of
a civil war or anything, frankly [it] just doesn't exist. It may be fine
to ruminate about what you think could exist or does exist. I can
tell you quite specifically, there's no civil war at the management
level and, to me, no observable civil war among the rank and file
either. So that's one thought I'd leave with you today.

Tim:
So, Brian, you're obviously someone who has, you
know, come up from the GPL side of the house but from the university
style of license regime. Clearly you have done a lot of thinking
about what licenses you would choose and why. Do you have any
thoughts on that, or any things you'd like to talk to Craig about
with regard to the BSD orientation.... [laughter]

One of the slides in [Craig Mundie's] presentation
was actually a very useful slide. It showed that there is a
relationship  a set of relationships  between the
public research through universities, corporations, users, and
government. I think what we've seen is that it's not
one-directional like that. What we've seen is that it's actually
bi-directional in all those things  in fact, bi-directional
across universities and consumers and government and business and all
those directions.

And so while Apache, for example, is under a
BSD-style license, it was very important while we were building the
Apache community that we not only have other corporations use it and
adopt it into their commercial products, but also that we communicate
to those companies the need to reinvest back, the need to build
Apache itself as a strong force as they build up the momentum behind
it. And to us, even though the obligation isn't there to share their
code back, the companies that are participating in the Apache
Software Foundation and even more broadly, within the BSD communities,
understand the need to reinvest, to build it back up. And that's one
thing that I think may be missing in some of this debate: the
creation of licenses, the creation of regimes that really are
bi-directional, that really put all the participants at an equal
level.

I totally welcome Microsoft exploring shared
source licenses. I think for proprietary software, I'd much rather
have the code to it than not have the code to it. I think we're going
to see a big difference in the amount of resources that people will
put in to a shared source license regime versus one that is an open
source license regime. So it's all a matter of experimentation. I'm
all for experimenting with different licenses. I think history has
shown that open source is a more efficient way to go in certain
circumstances. At the same time, there are 10 million Microsoft
developers out there who might have a different opinion. I think it's
worth finding out.

For the bulk of the panel discussion, Dave Stutz and Craig Mundie defended Microsoft's business position to the other panelists. Do you think this conversation helped bridge the gap between open source and Microsoft?

Craig:
One thought on that. I agree with you that it is
bi-directional, and in a way, when you look at all the different
licensing regimes, you're correct to point out that there are many
different ways to give back. In a sense, giving the code back
is just one way. You know giving taxes to the government to give back
is essentially another institutionalized way.

Tim:So how much does Microsoft pay in taxes? [laughter]

Craig:

It's a lot. I don't know the exact number this year,
but it's billions. One of the things that we've been fascinated by,
and I guess you could say it's some benchmark of this, [is that] this
week, as I kind of predicted in May, we actually came out with this
Windows CE source license. I guess we actually
posted it three, maybe four days ago. And the first three
days, ten thousand people downloaded the entire source tree. And we
had had a kit that we had offered to people who just wanted to use it
for commercial purposes and we had sold about four hundred of those
in the last year. I guess only time will tell whether people will
decide that they really want to make an investment or whether they're
just curious. But we were quite happy to see that when we offered it
for non-commercial use  really targeting the academic
environment, primarily  that ten thousand people in the first
three days decided to take it and take a look at it. So we're
enthused with that kind of reaction, and it is, you know, some way of
giving back. You know, we give back financially, we give back in the
standards world, as Michael said, with XML and other things. I mean,
well before XML, we've been a big participant in the process of
standardization, and so I think we will continue to seek ways to
share and give back.